Saturday, January 10, 2004

TO THE MOON, GEORGE

For the low end imagination, interplanetary travel is the old 1950s B-movie scenario of putting four or five grunts and a girl with big tits in a can with fins and shooting them off to Mars, where they wander about in bubble helmets for a while, pick up a few rocks, and, if they aren’t killed by Martians, climb back in the can and blast off home, sometimes taking a lethal alien lifeform with them.

Since the current White House as never exhibited anything beyond the most unpleasantly mundane of low end imaginations, I suspect the GWB space program will amount to little more than grunts in a can, overlaid by a mind bogglingly massive federal-industrial superstructure of corporate fraud and corruption. Meanwhile the NASA shuttle fleet is grounded and two guys are sitting in a half built space-station that’s leaking air.

After George has made his space speech, I hope I’ll be commenting on it more eruditely elsewhere, but right, now, as the story unfolds, all I can do is whistle and mutter “damn.”

Damn, but I’d like to see humanity make it to the stars. Like Sun Ra said, “space is the place.”
But, damn, I don’t want to go there on any spaceship commanded by a member of the Bush family.

Open the pod bay door, please HAL.

Or, as Lt. Ellen Ripley once remarked. "Blast off and nuke 'em from orbit."

Friday, January 09, 2004

FROM THE EMAIL

Munz has sent me a link to the online edition of a magazine called While You Were Sleeping (www.wyws.com) which contains an interview with Hunter S. Thompson. The doctor is in fine form, and also a handy reminder that all this debate about how the left needs to adopt the newspeak of the right to evict GWB from the White House is essentially bullshit, (see Doc40 Archive, December 5th, 2003) and that, in our everyday dealings we are quite capable of speaking plainly, and it?s only when a TV or a TV camera is turned on that the language becomes stifled and absurd.

Setting aside the fear and loathing and the fact that both Johnny Depp and Bill Murray have played him in the movie, the unique fact about Hunter is that he will talk to the media same as he talks the assholes in the bar. For example...

So, these Jesus freaks, these primitive hillbillies - really, worse than hillbillies: hellboys - they don't know anything, really. They're ignorant. And they don't know that what they're trying has been tried many times before. Yeah, it's called fascism. It's called state socialism or - fuck, I hate to say this ? but, theocracy. The separation of church and state has been the centerpiece of the American nation for 200 years. So we just try to brush aside 200 years of not just American but, shit, the whole world history. And you simply can't, anymore, get away with it....you know, it's not like a monarch, you can't just tax the peasants until they believe. They can't force them to work for nothing, confiscate their crops. You know, "all lands are royal lands," that worked back in Robin Hood's day in the Sherwood Forest. But it's not going to work when a bunch of cowboys with greasy oil hands reach out to seize nations that go back to, shit, 5,000 years before this alleged Jesus Christ.

The problem here would seem to be in that Hunter is promoted by the media as unique, and it?s somehow suggested that one has to be a drunken, multiple-abusing, veteran freak in order to call a fascist a fascist, and in this way he is clown-marginalized when he is, in fact, a national elder statesman of vision and clarity. (As in this second example.)

If every dead-head in this country voted next, or had voted in 2000, we would have a different government today. And not that that would guarantee anything, but we would all be a lot better off than we are now. The dead-heads carry a huge potential impact vote. At any age! I don't give a fuck what age. I've been a Grateful Dead addict ever since I met them. And that's an organizing basis. What the fuck? If they all voted, we could throw the president out. It's fun to throw the president out of the White House. I've done it. I know.

Thursday, January 08, 2004

HAPPY ELVIS’ BIRTHDAY (Footnote)

(Isn’t it fun how time runs backwards on these weblogs?)

At 6.00PM (Pacific) I watched The Simpsons (rerun) and noticed how a picture of Montgomery Burns shaking hands with Elvis Presley was prominently displayed on the wall of Waylon Smithers' office. Coincidence? Planning? Demi-divine intervention?

That Elvis Presley had a profound effect on my young life is hardly a secret. I’ve written four books on the man. One profound, two trivial, and one a best-seller. I still wear a small Elvis totem on the leather thong around my neck that carries all the gris-gris wampum talismans I need to stop planes crashing and get me home when drunk and incapable. I guess the idea that, had he lived, Elvis would have been sixty-nine today is food for less than savory thought. I hardly see Elvis pushing seventy in as debonair a fashion as Paul Newman, and suspect that, even with the basic will to survive, he would have been a even worse mess than Marlon Brando. Ho-hum.

I also learned the Godzilla will be fifty sometime this year. Maybe we should throw a party. First we would have to agree on the date.

(I still don't have the comments tech up. Write me at byron4d@aol.com)

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

DID YOU MISS ME?

If indeed anyone is really reading this, I wonder how much I really need or want to reveal about my day to day doings in the immediate world. This is partly because I find it hard to imagine why anyone should be interested in my habits, aliments, problems, deprivations, desires, needs, or complaints. Although it does seem to work for others. Since I fell into the weblogging habit, I’ve looked around some and discovered folks out there in the ether who want to chronicle everything from their shopping to their sex lives. I’ve glanced into he minds of potential teen suicides and a great many young women complaining about the deficiencies of their peers and boyfriends. I even found some male who appeared to be writing in a heavy metal glossolalia of his own devising. He was sufficiently weird that I considered a link, but then decided that he was better left alone. It could be embarrassing if I hooked him up with you all and then he blew up his high school. I guess that’s why I avoid the personal trivia. Fear of public embarrassment.

Thus, all I have to report today is that, over on the Funtopia site, the lastest episode of the weird-fiction serial Slide On The Run has just been posted. Hit homepage on the right >>>>> and then following the flashing links.